WuJen shakes his head, "No. Short of actually breaking this guys mind I doubt I'll get anything he hasn't already given, and it doesn't seem like it's worth that."

"I don't want to sound too mercenary about it, but it seems like Johnson was happy and we got paid. As a bonus these guys didn't get eaten by the ghouls. I say cut them loose and hope none of this bites us in the ass later."

(OOC: We can wait till 10 to see what happens. There's still something about the setup that does not feel right. Too much effort in the double blind, and these guys stood a better than average chance of not waking up without our involvement. It's possible they were watching and would have picked them up if we hadn't. Or it could be something else. I don't know. It just seems like there's a few large pieces missing to what should have been a fairly simple deal.)

The man says, "Moshi moshi?" into the commlink. A distorted voice on the other side replies, "Relax Watanabe-san. Your son will be treated, despite your failure to take the package to the dead drop."

The commlink then switches to speaker mode, allowing the voice on the other side to be heard by everyone in the room. "Saito-san, your gambling debts are no longer. Nakamura-san, your sister has already been found and is awaiting you at your home. Ishikawa-san, congratulations on your son's acceptance to Mingmei University. Ikeda-san, the images have been destroyed and the person who took them has been permanently dealt with."

As each guard is addressed by the distorted voice, they breathe a sigh of relief. The voice then says, "As for the rest of you, forgive my little ruse. I am sure you are all quite put off by the events of the night and no doubt have questions. While I make no promises to answer all of them, I will answer some. Once you are done with your questions, I would like to offer a proposal. But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Ask your questions."

Visibly struggling to choose, Sun considers picking a question, ranging from "Who are you" over "How did you know we're here?" to "What was the point of setting this ruse up?" and an entire array in-between. He takes a deep breath, and decides to just go for all of them. He moves his mouth close to the commlink and speaks too loudly. His own commlink somehow creates a small feedback loop by being so close to the other one. As a result, he's hard to understand, but can still be made out asking his three main questions.

Chougou will ask afterwards ((if it hasn't been answered by Raf's questions)) if the man knew the ninjas that attacked his agents.

Because Chougou had assumed (and says as much) that the ninjas were part of the test that they just went through, but apparently these other men were supposed to take the package to a drop-off location?

WuJen listens in silence. The only question he really wants an answer to thus far is Sun's "What's the point of this ruse". He knew that getting into shadow business would be messy on occasion, but intends to keep it as honest as possible.

It does not bode well to him that this relationship starts out with such chicanery.

The voice on the commlink says, "Who I am is less important than what I represent. I speak on behalf of the Arcane Institute of Defense, or AID for short.

"As for how we know you are there, the commlink you are speaking through has a camera. Most do. We have also been monitoring your actions throughout the night by surveillance drone. The tracking device you carried in the package you were given ensured that we would always know exactly where you were until the dropoff. Afterwards, the tracking device hidden in the gold credstick you acquired allowed us to further keep track of your movements. It appears to have been quite the eventful evening. Though we had no hand in either of your incidents with local gangs, it was educational to see how you dealt with them nevertheless.

"Now, for the point of this exercise. There are a great many threats to this world that the average person does not know about. Your recent dealings with our associate Mikuzume-san have caught our attention. Though you have proven yourselves effective at dealing with such threats, there are many mercenaries who could do the same and we prefer to deal with those who have a moral stake in what must be done to protect this world, rather than simply a monetary one. We wished to see how you functioned under pressure against an apparently superior foe. As far as our test was concerned, you failed miserably when you gave up the package to them and accepted their money.

"However, we observed as you risked your lives to save others in two other incidents where you had no reason to involve yourselves beyond moral obligation. In each case, you were out-gunned and out-numbered, and it would have been far easier for you to simply ignore the situation. We have judged these incidents to be of far greater weight towards judging your moral character than our original test. That you took the time to take care of these people and made no use of torture in your interrogation when it became apparent that the mission was a ruse only further cements our decision on the matter.

"Once again, we apologize for the subterfuge but our organization deals with a great many threats to this world, knowledge of which we would prefer did not get released to the public. Our enemies would love to get their hands on these threats to exploit for their own purposes. Though those ninjas you faced were our agents in disguise, they were disguised as members of one of our greatest enemies. Had you truly met them, I assure you that none of these men would have been drugged. They would all be quite dead, as would each of you. Instead, they will continue on with their lives, a little happier, but with no knowledge of what happened here."

The leader quickly interrupts and says, "What do you mean by that?" but receives no response. Instead, the commlink voice says, "Is there anything else you wish to ask?"

"If you were watching everything, you know that by the time we got to the junkyard a schoolchild might have beaten us in that fight. If you are as omnipotent as you are pretending, you know that while we gave up the package we were not going to leave it at that, but had intentions of tracking you down if your intent was dangerous to the community...which is why we are having this conversation."

"While I except a certain amount of shadiness from my clients, given the nature of the shadows, I can not tolerate outright deception. In that *you* have failed. You may be telling the truth, or you may be lieing to gain our trust, and at this point the latter is most likely because all of your actions up to this point have been nothing but deception."

"If you have been watching us, then you know that our decisions are driven by an ideal that making life better for ourselves includes making life better for everybody. I am not an idiot, I know that reality will not always be kind to that ideal. We can only chart the course that benefits the most, even if that means sometimes sacrifices have to be made. I can't save the whole world. I'm one guy with a few friends."

Sun shakes his head. "Not to mention, we didn't even know if the guys who were down, were our contacts, or if you guys were. For all we knew, your ninja guys could have been our contacts and the guys on the ground could have ambushed you. You can't in good faith judge morality if you don't let us know at least what our contact looks like."

"Regardless of our individual opinions of each other, in either direction, you appear to have made a decision about work that we could help you with.

While we are about business, we too have need to verify your intentions and morality before we could accept work from you. As my colleague Wujen mentioned, this is certainly an unorthodox way to start a business relationship.

Since you have tested us and we passed, if not in the way that you expected, this whole experience will all have been of little value to everyone involved if we don't understand what your intentions are, for us and for Mingmei.

So with respect, if you would be so kind as to explain what your intentions with these men are and how we could form a business partnership with a guarantee of no more deception."

The commlink says, "You were in no condition to save that elf woman, but you prevailed. Threats often come when you are least prepared for them. They will not show you mercy merely because you are too tired to face them at the time. Do not feign ignorance of who you believed these people to be. You rang the commlink. You knew that its owner had been the one who was waiting for you. I have full confidence that you could have thought of some means of dealing with your foes.

"We didn't lie to you, though. We did not give you every bit of information, but all we said was to deliver the package. If we had said that our intention was to see how you accomplished your task rather than whether or not you accomplished it, that would have tainted the results. Anyone can pretend to be a good person when they know they are being monitored. Only truly good people do so when there is no one looking. And as I said, your actions prior to that point showed that you have the type of character that we would like to work with.

"At any rate, the people you have captured will have their memories erased and then they will be taken to their homes. As will you all, should you choose not to work with us. Primarily we will need you to take care of supernatural threats, or keep them out of the hands of those who could cause harm with them. The work will not be morally questionable, but there may be the occasional time where the occasional law will need to be broken. For the most part though, the work will have no legal complications. Your encounter with the jiang-shi is actually a typical example of the type of work we would require of you. We suspect some rules had to be bent while you were locating the creature, but nothing that would have brought much heat upon your heads.

"If you feel you cannot trust us or do not wish to work with an organization that must often obscure information so as to keep it out of the hands of our enemies, then we understand and will wish you well on your way. It would be unfortunate, but acceptable. If you can accept working under little information to ultimately make this world a better place, then we will have much work for you in the future."

"You wouldn't mind then of course, should we choose to accept your offer, if we were to follow up discretely with these gentlemen to see that their promised troubles have been resolved.

We appear to have convergent interests from what you have said, but verifying that you follow up on what you have promised them would go very far in letting us know that you are indeed of similar mind with us in regards to justice."

The commlink says, "There is no obligation to complete any job we present to you. You are free to decline it as you would any other job. However, we will need to know now one way or the other whether you will be willing to work with us."

"I won't speak for any of the others, but I will work *with* you, if only to keep an eye on you. You have a fair point that I work with Mikuzume with little reservation, and it is rarely straightforward either, especially to those it does not know. In fact, I believe it enjoys pretending to be human, or at least flesh and blood. The difference is that I don't believe it to be malicious, merely somewhat alien. I can't say I feel the same about you yet, but if the work you have is similar to what we had to contend with in hunting the Jiang-Shi, I can live with that."

"However, the day will come when I will need to know more. Paid to hunt monsters is fine, but when we start getting into byzantine politics between warring groups of awakened, as is obviously the case here, I will need to know both my allies and my enemies."

"If for some reason we were not able to take jobs from you for some time, do you intend to come after us to wipe our memories?

You seem to have full control of any situation above and beyond our resources to counter you, so it would be inevitable it seems if you decided to do it. I would just like to get on the same page to understand if you intend to do it anyway, or if you can give us assurance that at some point you all won't find that necessary."